Dead Voices (8 page)

Elizabeth stumbled forward as though she were drunk. Her arms flailed wildly, punching back and forth as she labored to push her way through the snow in the wake of the snow plow. The bright orange flashers on the back of the truck painfully stabbed her eyes as she watched both vehicles tumble down in slow motion over the drop. She watched in horrified silence as the plow flipped over, and its full weight came crashing down onto the Subaru’ s front end.

Elizabeth was still screaming when Doug caught up to her. She grabbed him by the arms and shook him. screaming her agony and terror as they both helplessly watched the car and truck finally stop their tumble and come to rest more than a hundred feet off the road. In either her ears or her mind, Elizabeth could still hear Caroline’s cries —”Mommy! ... Help! ...”

Looking down at the flattened wreck of the car, Elizabeth thought she saw Caroline’s face in the rear window. Her eyes and mouth were nothing more than round, black holes in the blur that floated behind the glass.

There was a short burst of angry crackling as gasoline splashed from the truck’s ruptured gas tank onto the Subaru. A blinding second later, the snow plow exploded. A huge ball of orange/lame and billowing black smoke leaped into the night sky to be swallowed by the storm. Thicker smoke rolled out from under the overturned truck. Then there was a second, louder explosion as the intense heat ignited the Subaru’s gas tank.

Before she passed out and fell to the ground, Elizabeth was dimly aware that Doug was no longer standing beside her. As darkness swelled around her, pulling her down, she was positive she could still hear Caroline’s screams, echoing in her ears. Even though she knew full well that the explosions andfiames had silenced her daughter’s cries ... forever!

5
.

“ ... Then a snow plow came roaring around the comer, smashed into the car, and exploded.” Elizabeth’s voice hitched, but she forced herself to continue. “Caroline died instantly ... At least, I find myself hoping so.” Tears swelled in her eyes. She covered her face with her hands, muffling her voice. “I
have
to believe that!”

“Well,” Graydon said, in the lengthening silence. He shifted uneasily in his chair. “The loss of a child is certainly tragic, and it certainly goes a long way in explaining why your marriage might not hold together.”

Elizabeth’s eyes glazed over as she looked up at Graydon, her mind dredging up — again — the horrors of that night. Tears flowed freely from her eyes. She reached blindly for the box of Kleenex on the coffee table, got a tissue, and then buried her face in it. Her shoulders shook and her lungs ached as grief and pain filled her, seeking an outlet. It startled her when she felt Graydon’s hand come to rest reassuringly on her shoulder.

“The loss of a child — or anyone close to you — is something I feel certain no one can ever really get over,” he said, lowering his voice until it was barely more than a comforting buzz. “Believe me. I know from personal experience. And I would chance to say that the agony stays with you your whole life ... unless you find you can do something to get rid of the blocks that allow it to ruin your life. And —” He took a deep breath, sat back down in his chair, and rubbed his strong-looking hands together once he seemed assured the worse of Elizabeth’s emotional outburst was over. “I believe that’s what therapy can do. It can only help you if you’re brave enough to face your grief, and then do something to settle it in your mind and overcome it.”

When he said the word
do
, he brought his fist down into his opened palm so hard it made a loud, wet, smacking sound. Elizabeth was startled, but the sudden burst of positive energy she felt coming from Graydon, even in spite of her internal agony, made her smile slightly.

“Now I’m not saying I’m necessarily the therapist for you,” Graydon went on, leaning back and glancing momentarily at the ceiling. “As a matter of fact, I always encourage my prospective clients to do a bit of comparative shopping. I can give you the names of several other highly qualified therapists in the area if you’d like.”

Elizabeth wasn’t sure why, but she instantly shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “Dr. Gavreau recommended you to me, and I think ... I think we can probably work well together. That is, if you’re willing to work with me.”

“I’d like nothing better,” Graydon said quickly. He looked at her with an intense stare.

Surprised by his quick acceptance, Elizabeth frowned and regarded him carefully. “Just like that?” she asked, snapping her fingers.

“I’ll give it careful consideration, then,” Graydon said, smiling widely, “if it makes you feel better. After a day or two, why don’t you give me a call to set up another appointment?”

“I will,” Elizabeth replied. She was surprised that she was being so forward, but she took this as an indication that she was comfortable working with Graydon. When she stood up to leave, and Graydon went to get her jacket from the coatrack, she wondered what it was that made her feel so inclined toward him, Maybe, she thought, it was simply that she felt a sense of empathy from him concerning her loss, He might help set her free ... as free as those sea gulls she had seen, white specks circling against the blue.

6.

“What the fuck is this?” Frank snarled as he walked up to his partner, who was standing in the parking lot behind the Bristol Mills police station with Ed Phillips, the night dispatcher, and Chuck Willis, the desk sergeant. “You guys having a cops’ convention or what?”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, an hour before his shift began, and Frank had had to stop short to avoid running over the three men.

“This is something you’d sorta expect to have happen in Hitler’s Germany, not Maine,” Willis said, pointing to a freshly spray painted piece of graffiti on the wall.

“Come on, Chuck,” Norton said, snickering. “That ain’t no Star of David. This here’s a pentagram. It’s something they use in witchcraft stuff, I think.”

“When’d this happen?” Frank asked. He frowned deeply as he scanned the uneven five-pointed star.

All three men shrugged, and then Norton said, “Must’ve been sometime last night. I ‘spoze we didn’t notice it in the dark when we got off duty. Ed was the first one who spotted it this morning. “

“Who in the hell would do something like this?” Willis asked, still scratching his head. Frank found himself wondering if Willis’s habitual scratching was out of perplexity or due to scalp problems.

“It ain’t nothing but a Goddamned prank, that’s what
I
think,” Ed said with a snarl.

Frank and Norton exchanged meaningful glances, and then Frank cleared his throat and said, “If you fellas have heard about what Norton and me found out to Oak Grove last night, you might think otherwise. “

“What?” Willis asked. Yesterday had been his day off, and he had obviously not yet heard about the “incident” at plot 317. In as few words as possible, leaving out the more gruesome details, Frank filled him in.

“Well, then, Jesus H. Christ! No wonder,” Willis said excitedly. For about three seconds, he stopped scratching his head, then he started up again. “I’ll bet you, sure as shit, there’s one of them witchcraft — what d’yah call ‘em? Convents or covenants or whatever.”

“You don’t mean covens, do you?” Ed asked.

“Yeah — whatever,” Willis replied. ‘‘I’ll bet that’s who did this.”

“I think this is serious,” Frank said, frowning as he squinted at the dripping red lines of freshly applied paint. The pentagram covered an area roughly six feet by six feet. “Someone tall enough to reach this high did it. I don’t think it’s any kid’s prank.”

“Come on, Frank, lighten up, “ Norton said, slapping him good naturedly on the shoulder. “You’re still just freaked out from last night.”

Frank turned to his partner and was about to say something about Norton puking all over his shoes, but he decided to let it pass. Pointing at the muddy tire marks on the asphalt, he said to Willis, “I’ve got a report to write up and file before I head mit, but if I was you, I’d get a lab tech to take a few snaps of these tire tracks. Who knows? Maybe one of ‘em will match up with the ones we found out in the cemetery last night.”

“You just drove over them,” Norton said.

Cocking an eyebrow, Frank said, “Yeah, well I didn’t see any of you guys flagging me away, either.”

“Yeah, I’ll get a tech out here right away,” Willis said, running his fingertips over his ears; but he and none of the other men moved from where they stood as Frank turned and walked into the station to fill out his report.

THREE

Toys in the Attic

1.

During the drive home from Graydon’s, Elizabeth had plenty to think about as she evaluated her new therapist. She was fairly certain she would work with him, especially since Dr. Gavreau had recommended him so highly; and anyway, it was just a doctor patient ... no, make that doctor — client relationship. Although the intimacy of a relationship like that could get quite intense, it wasn’t as if they were getting married. She had to admit that the longer she had been with Graydon, the more she had come to recognize that he had quite a magnetic, almost hypnotic charm about him.

Just be careful. she warned herself.

When she got back home, just after three o’clock, she was relieved to find that both of her parents were out. Her mother had left a note on the kitchen table, informing her she had gone to Portland for groceries. Elizabeth crumpled up the note and tossed it into the wastebasket. Her father was probably working outside or gone for supplies.

She sat down at the kitchen table and let her mind wander as she gazed blankly out the window and over the field to the woods beyond. She already felt committed to work with Graydon, and she knew that this meant she would in all likelihood stay with her parents, at least for the time being. And that meant she would soon have to start looking for a job; she had no intention of freeloading off her parents indefinitely. Rather than rush the future or dwell too long and hard on the past, as Dr. Gavreau had told her, she decided for now, at least — just to let things unfold in their own time, to see what would happen without her pushing one way or another.

The house was soothingly quiet.

Consciously breathing deeply and evenly, Elizabeth got up and went from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. She tried to open up her senses and let herself fully enjoy the tranquility. The clock on the mantel measured a steady, low tick-tock. The sound reminded her of those long-ago afternoons when she had sat in the living room, either doing her homework or else dozing on the couch. Long, yellow bars of sunlight angled across the floor and edged up over the faded wallpaper, casting long shadows of chair and table legs. Spinning motes of dust whirled like planets in her passing as she sat down on the couch, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes.

If she let herself, she could almost imagine that it was twenty years ago: that she had never grown up, never gone to college, never married Doug, and never given birth to ...

“Aww,
shit
!” she said, jumping to her feet as soon as she thought the name
Caroline
.

She spoke aloud so suddenly, so sharply, her voice sounded foreign to her own ears, as though someone else in the room had spoken. Pacing back and forth across the living-room rug, she felt her eyes widening as they darted back and forth, scanning the quiet house as though looking for an unseen presence she had dimly sensed.

‘‘Take it easy, there,” she muttered to herself, even as she looked almost frantically at the familiar furniture, seeking an anchor to hold down the sudden flood of panic she had felt rising inside her like a tide. She rubbed her hands together, noticing they were clammy. The veins on the backs of her hands stood out like thin blue strings against her winter-pale skin. A thick, salty taste filled the back of her throat, and tears began to roll down her cheeks.

Was it thinking about Caroline that had started this? she wondered. Or had Graydon said something — or dragged something out of her subconscious that had triggered this sharp, clear pain? Or maybe ... just maybe it was missing —

“ — Caroline,” she whispered, no more than a ragged, tearing sound.

Here it’s been a year and a half, she thought, and the grief and pain are still as sharp as the day it happened. The wounds hadn’t healed or even dulled, and Elizabeth knew the pain would never go away. She was going to have to learn to live with it and not let it turn her into an emotional cripple.

Without knowing why, Elizabeth turned and started up the stairs, but rather than going to her bedroom to lie down, she continued down the hallway to the attic door. Flipping the wall switch by the door, she undid the bolt lock, turned the handle, and started up into the attic.

The smell of stale air wafted down the stairway and sent her memories reeling. The attic had always been a special place for her; she used to come up here and hide whenever she was upset and didn’t want anyone to see her.

Elizabeth also remembered the many rainy or snowy afternoons when she and her sister Pam, or her best friends from school, Joanie and Barb, had come up here to play or to paw through the boxes and piles of accumulated junk. No, not junk —
treasures
! Old books and magazines. her grandparents’ musty old clothes, boxes of toys and jigsaw puzzles, a trunk of old family letters and photographs, and carton upon carton of old tools and useless gadgets, some of which she could never identify.

Elizabeth walked slowly up the stairs, trying her best not to let herself wonder how much Caroline would have loved to come up here and explore!

Feeling warm with nostalgia, Elizabeth started going through the boxes marked with her name and, for the next hour or so, the memories that came back to her were almost dizzying. One of the first things she uncovered was the dark blue dress and shoes she had worn the night Frank Melrose had taken her to the Junior Prom — the night they had driven out to Bristol Pond, instead of going to the post — Prom party, and “gone all the way” for the first time. The frilly lace was yellowed with age and seemed about to crumble to nothingness as she touched it; the shoes she remembered as being fit for Cinderella now looked chintzy and sad. The dress was almost as hopelessly old fashioned as her grandmother’s wedding gown had appeared to her. She shook the dress out and held it up to her shoulders in almost total disbelief that she had once thought it was the most gorgeous thing in the world.